Sunday, March 13, 2011

Saturday, March 12, 2011

We just updated our homepage and made a few changes. We kept the listening stations for the X-tal archives but the links for our most recent releases go directly to the iTunes pages. We encourage our friends to follow the links and explore the music. Every time you preview a song, we get a few pennies in our coffers, which helps us survive in this brutal capitalist world.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

The Mountain Goats have never been known for agitprop, but John's always been a conscious guy, and a remake of this classic anthem has never been more timely. (Hat-tip to Truculent & Unreliable for helping put this one out there.)

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

A lot of songs carried over from the previous month's top 20, but pole-vaulting to the top is something new and beautiful:

The number one song on this month's chart is unique in that it features no humans contributing to the music. And by that we don't mean it is a heavily-sequenced piece of electronica. Oh no, the Thai Elephant Orchestra is exactly what it says it is: original music composed and performed by actual elephants (lovingly assisted by their pet humans).

More empathy for the animal kingdom follows with the late Ari Up delivering the title track of the final Slits album, Trapped Animal. Donovan returns with his impression of Sunset Strip life circa 1966, Brighter Shades deliver the sound of young Baltimore, Tom Verlaine and Sonic Youth give us two extremes of exploratory New York guitar music, and Neil Young woos a beautiful dancer.

Some rare gems surface this month: Portland's Neo Boys offer up some reassuring words from their extremely out of print Crumbling Myths EP, Modmach (led by ex-Unit and current Winston Tong collaborator LX Rudis) serve up a tense, circular depiction of stress and escapism featuring some mad guitar from MX-80's Bruce Anderson, Northern California guitar virtuoso (and firm friend of the Ear Candle posse) Matthew Grasso offers up an original composition that pirouettes intricately around a single note, and Linda Smith shows up with another one of her calm, deliberately paced homemade pop masterworks.

We hear from spoken word guru Ken Nordine, lost genius songwriter Elliott Smith, the mighty Dirtbombs of Detroit, a cool instrumental from Chuck Berry, an evergreen psychedelic ballad by the Troggs, a trippy post-punk drone-rant from Public Image Ltd, Patti Smith and her snakecharming post-Coltrane clarinet, a lovelorn patient by the name of Gregory, and Brian Wilson surfin' with Gershwin.